I slipped on my old combat clothes and boots, then grabbed my jacket and rose, shoving my arms into the sleeves as I walked across to the door at the far end of the bunk room. A red warning light flashed as I neared it.

“Name, rank,” a gruff metallic voice said. Over the years I’d named it Hank, simply because it reminded me somewhat of the cranky custodian who’d run the base exchange. He still haunted the lower floors, although he tended to avoid both me and the children.

“Tiger C5, déchet, lure rank.”

I pressed my thumb against the blood-work slot. A small needle shot out and took the required sample, but the door remained securely closed. Even though I’d adjusted the power ratios and cut several levels out of the security net, it still took an interminably long time for the system down here to react. But then, with only one hydrogen-fueled generator and the banks of solar batteries powering the system during the day, everything was slow. And I couldn’t risk firing up a second generator when I needed at least two running at night to cope with the main defense systems. I had only three generators in total and—with parts so scarce in the world above—I had to be careful. That meant conserving the system where I could and doing continual maintenance.

The scanner finally kicked into gear. After checking my irises, the door beeped and swung open. The corridor beyond was cold and dark, the metal walls dripping with condensation. Ghosts swirled, their little bodies wisps of fog that drifted along in blackness.

The sounds of my footfalls echoed across the stillness, hinting at the vastness of this underground military bunker. And yet this was the smallest of the three bases humans had used during the race war—a war that might have lasted only five years but had forever altered the very fabric of our world.

The shifters—with their greater strength, speed, and the capacity to heal almost any wound—should have wiped the stain of humanity from Earth. But humans had not wasted the many years leading up to the war, and the bioengineering labs, which had initially produced nothing more than body-part replacements for the sick and dying, had gone into full—and secret—production. These labs had created not only an enzyme that gave humans the same capacity to heal as the shifters, but also the designed humanoid. Or déchet, as we’d become known.

It said a lot about humanity’s opinion of us that we were given a nickname that meant “waste product.”

Most of us hadn’t come from human stock, but were rather a mix of shifter and vampire, which gave us most of their strengths and few of their weaknesses. We’d been humanity’s supersoldiers—designed to fight and to die without thought or feeling—and we’d almost turned the tide of the war.